When some 19th New Yorkers said "Harlem", they meant
almost all of Manhattan above 86th Street. Toward the end of the
century, however, a group of citizens in upper Manhattan want, perhaps, to
62. ______ shape a closer and more precise sense of
community designated a section that they wished to have known as Harlem. The
chosen area was the Harlem which Blacks were moving in the first decades of
the 63. ______ new century as they left their old settlements on
the middle and lower blocks of the. West Side. As the
community became predominantly Black, file very word "Harlem" seemed to lose
its old mean. At times it was easy to forget 64. ______ that
"Harlem" was originally the Dutch name "Harlem", the
65. ______ community it described had been founded
by people from Holland, and that for most of its three centuries--it was
first settled in the sixteen hundreds—it had been preoccupied by White New
Yorkers. 66. ______ "Harlem" became synonymous to
Black life and Black style in 67.
______ Manhattan. Blacks living there used the word as though they
had coined it on themselves—not only to designate their area of residence 68.
______ but to express their sense of the various qualities of its life
end atmosphere. As the years passed, "Harlem" asserted an even larger
69. ______ meaning. In the words of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.,
the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem "became the symbol of
liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere". By
1919, ’Harlem’s population had grown by several thousand. It had received its
share of wartime migration from the South, the Caribbean, and parts of
colonial Africa. Some of the new arrivals merely lived in Harlem; it was New
York they had come to, looking 70. ______ for jobs and
for all the other legendary opportunities of life in the city. To others who
migrated to Harlem, New York was merely the city in which they found
themselves: Harlem was exactly what they 71.
______ wished to be.